EGO ELLA MAY
HONEY FOR WOUNDS
UPPERROOM RECORDS
★★★★
London’s Ego Ella May definitely knows a good title: her debut ‘proper’ is exactly as she describes it, a sweet balm for troubled times. Those times are the subject of How Long Till We’re Home, a graceful depiction of hopelessness and defiance in the face of contemporary idiocy, and Girls Don’t Always Sing About Boys is a cymbal-splashed slice of conscious neo-soul: “Would anybody listen at all/ If I don’t parade in a bra?” Table 4 One, meanwhile, brings jazz-fusion to Erykah Badu’s grooves.